St Catherine’s Close, Norwich

Sometimes called St Catherine’s House, it’s almost universally referred to as St Catherine’s Close, and this is the name which appears on official documents. “Close” is an odd way to refer to a building, but it originally had two acres of garden with it so we can only imagine the site took over all of what was once a close off All Saints Green, where it was located. “All Saints Green” is / was also a common shorthand for referring to the BBC site.

Despite later becoming known as the home of Look East and very much a TV building, when it was taken over by the BBC in the 1950s it was entirely conceived, designed and opened as a radio site. The BBC began looking for a base in Norwich in 1954, as a home for its new East Anglian operation, to provide VHF opt-outs for East Anglia on the newly-opened Tacolneston transmitter’s frequency of the Midland Home Service. Several different buildings were considered, mostly Georgian or Victorian villas and mansions. It was the BBC’s existing engineer-in-charge in Norfolk, Eric Hammond, who recommended the site. He ran the BBC’s transmitters at Postwick and Tacolneston, and had done since the late 1940s. St Catherine’s Close at the time was owned by the Great Hospital in Norwich, and had been leased as a private house and also used by the nearby Bond’s department store as their restaurant after they had suffered bomb damage during the war. By 1954 it was up for lease, and the engineering company Mann Egerton had agreed a deal. However, Hammond had become aware that Mann Egerton didn’t really want the bother of looking after the house, they just wanted to turn most the garden into a garage / car dealership. Hammond was able to agree for the BBC to lease the building and fifty feet back from it of the garden, and Mann Egerton took on the rest of the old garden site.The BBC’s renovations took a long time – the gardener, Peter Battle, who grew up in a cottage on the site remembered the house being so stripped back you could stand on the ground floor and see right up to the ceiling of the first floor as the BBC installed sound proofing, etc. The file for the building in the Written Archive Centre at Caversham is about two inches thick and filled with orders for all types of furniture, fixtures and fittings, and even a paint sampler for the colour of the entrance hallway!The BBC finally officially moved in on Monday the 10th of September 1956. They were providing programmes into the wider Midland Home Service by that December, and in February 1957 began providing weekly VHF opt-out programmes purely for East Anglia, followed by a daily East Anglian news bulletin from March 1958. Becoming aware that Anglia TV had got their licence and were preparing to launch, the BBC determined that they must launch an East Anglian TV service first, and in October 1959 managed to beat Anglia to air by a matter of weeks, launching a new TV bulletin from St Catherine’s Close from a new TV studio built in an extension at the back of the building. TV and radio then co-existed at St Catherine’s Close until 1980, when the regional radio service (by now an opt-out of Radio 4) came to an end and the east’s first BBC Local Radio station opened, Radio Norfolk. There wasn’t room to squeeze Radio Norfolk into St Catherine’s Close so they were based across the road on the ground floor of Norfolk Tower on Surrey Street. The old radio studio became a meeting room / hospitality area, and the radio control room was turned into part of the engineering / graphics department. Apparently the big window between the two survived for some years afterwards, as did the red light above the door outside the old radio studio.A further extension for a new, improved TV studio had been built in the mid-1970s when the region moved into colour, but BBC East never had a full-blown production studio, just a news one. This was going to change in the late 1980s when they got planning permission to build a brand new small production studio (along the lines of what Southampton got when they moved to their new building at around this time) having threatened to move the regional HQ to Cambridge if they didn’t get planning permission from Norwich City Council.TV finally moved out in 2003, when after 23 years apart BBC East all moved back in under one roof at The Forum in Norwich. The main original part of St Catherine’s Close is now occupied by the solicitors Clapham & Collinge, while the 1970s BBC extension is now a dentist.

A big thank you to Paul Hayes for his help and knowledge with the copy on this page.